Feminist anthropology最新文献

Feminist and multispecies anthropologies have decentered those most visible to appreciate the perspectives of those othered in society—but also to better understand society at large. This article goes beyond decentering the human toward decentering another analytical focus: the species dyad. Building on previous work on gender–species intersectionality and multispecies ethnography, as well as drawing on a set of five ethnographic and multispecies fieldwork studies involving gendered relations between humans, cattle, and horses on three continents, this article offers a conceptualization of the multispecies triad by outlining a multispecies intersectionality theory. This entails acknowledging the intersectionality of five sets of relations: (1) species as a power relation beyond biology; (2) intersecting power relations of humans (such as gender and ethnicity as well as local categories); (3) humans’ organization of nonhumans into intraspecies categories (by for example sex, breed, age as well as local categories); (4) nonhumans’ own intraspecies power relations; and (5) nonhumans’ relations to intraspecies groups of other species (including human subgroups). By situating a multispecies triad in this multispecies intersectionality, the article shows how relations of power intersect within and across species with consequences for individuals and groups of all species involved. Multispecies intersectionality can thus be of interest even to scholars primarily interested in humans.

This article seeks to contribute to a scholarly conversation about love beyond dominant assumptions of romance, desire, and attraction by exploring what love comes to mean as situated in and governed by violence and marginalization in the shadows of political conflict. Based on ethnographic fieldwork among Muslim women in Palawan, the Philippines, I unpack the empirical notion of learning to love as it occurred in their stories of marriage. The article argues that learning to love reflects the women's struggles to survive socially, emotionally, and materially, and to make a life and selves. In this way, love is rooted in patriarchal relationality, the cultivation of moral and religious ideals of womanhood as well as in the social and material dependency in the family revealing love as familial togetherness, attachment, and support. On this basis, the process of learning love captures the women's work of learning to live, reclaiming sociality and social worth within the violent and confining conditions that structure their lives.

This article aims to describe how contemporary societies dominated by racial capitalism and heteropatriarchy view and treat silence as an emptiness to be avoided. Without denying the importance of breaking from the silence of oppression, I argue that the dialectic between norms and silences is at the foundation of sociocultural life. Moreover, silence in feminist theory can be understood as a form of décrochage (lit. “unhooking”) from hegemonic norms, thus opening spaces of doubt and questioning (or spaces of vraisemblance). Dwelling in these spaces, which I believe is the predicament of feminist anthropology, allows us to craft the sociocultural, artistic, and theoretical tools to engage in a state of becoming and emancipation.

The notion of generations runs through feminist theory, rendering it singular and disciplining its proper subjects—but might there be modes of generational thought that explode the bounds of linearity and propriety, offering ways to think of kinship and generativity amid and despite conditions of violence? Drawing on ethnography situated in South Asia, and the gendered insights that emerge from it, we reflect on feminist knowledge as a site of kinship that complicates any simple picture of inheritance and lineage. Affiliations of thought, practice, and relating might be characterized instead by a range of gendered practices which are constituted by, and draw attention to, modes and processes such as gathering and dispersal; impasse and reconnection; and recognition and uncertainty.

In this article we offer the term otherwise as a keyword for feminist vocabulary. We consider how the otherwise is simultaneously a concept, an analytics, a method, and an ethico-onto-political commitment to the insistence of the possible against the pull of the probable. The otherwise conjures latent possibilities and potentialities held within a situation or formation—which we might only glimpse obliquely, yet which holds or opens to liberatory transformation. While a standard genealogy of the term might trace its theoretical lineage, we aim to enact the otherwise we write by decentering this genealogy. Our essay is situated in conversation with feminist Black studies, science and technology studies, and decolonial studies, seeking to potentiate the transformative possibilities of bringing together these literatures. We explore the world-making capacities of an otherwise anthropology through practices such as: attunement to the political in the mundane; speculative colaboring as a form of care; the fracturing of anthropological epistemologies; writing as a complex we; and not knowing. Finally, our collaborative essay is refracted through our respective experiences of social unrest and protests in Hong Kong and Colombia to enact an unruly and undisciplined genealogy of the otherwise, written from here, now.

What is queer in contemporary transnational queer studies? In this essay, I explore queer as a political-intellectual orientation and aspirational field animated by its constitutive polarity: between a more constrained queer focused on sex, sexuality, and gender and a more expansive queer that bears an oblique relationship to these more proper objects. I trace how the desire to do justice to our objects of study produces queer’s characteristic inversions, so that when we seek to move “beyond” queer’s proper objects, we find ourselves drawn back into them and inversely, when we seek to center proper subjects of queer, we find ourselves elsewhere and otherwise. I illuminate this queer movement through a conceptual review of recent scholarship in queer anthropology (loosely 2015-21), drawing out queer as (1) a challenge to categorical legibility, (2) a way to rethink vitalities between bio- and necropolitics, (3) a field of political, social, and sensual erotics and desires, and (4) a deconstruction of normative knowledge projects and epistemologies. Throughout, I reflect on anthropology's place in a larger project of a queer theory from (and seeking) an elsewhere.

Feminist anthropology offers conceptual and methodological clarity to the study of backlash, a phenomenon made salient once more by the global conservative turn of the 2010s. As contemporary crises of social reproduction have, once again, focused majoritarian angst and anger on women, queer people, immigrants, and people of color, scholars have returned (again) to discuss backlash. Critically, feminist anthropology can move past media narratives of backlash, which often emphasize the emotional habits of backlash perpetrators, to understand how backlash operates as a specific mode of power through the experiences of its targets. This keyword entry joins recent retheorizations in conceiving backlash not as a reactive event but rather as an elaboration of the ongoing logics of structural oppression. Critically examining media and scholarly analyses of Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro's election and rise of the extreme right in Brazil as its case study, this entry examines how fieldwork-based approaches offer expanded theoretical purchase on the backlash concept.

Historically and globally, Black people have engaged in practices of maroonage to resist bondage and re-make free homes and communities. In this article, I offer maroons as a keyword and assert that Blackgirls are present-day maroons in plain sight who resist structural bondage and re-make practices of survivance in the pursuit of freedoms on an everyday basis. Through the article, I share and analyze ethnographic data as well as poetry and lyrics written by Blackgirls and womxn who enact their/our resistance and maroonage in plain sight.

Self-care is everywhere these days. Unlike “care,” it is not yet a central term in anthropology, but recent ethnographic studies point up its potential. In this keyword entry, we trace out distinct yet co-present understandings of the term that stem from radically different worldviews and construct it in oppositional, mutually exclusive ways. The first is the Black feminist lineage, which defines self-care as a political warfare within and against an American system of intersectional oppression. The second is a multidisciplinary body of work which builds on Foucault and defines self-care as a neoliberal form of domination and subjectification. Finally, we examine a burgeoning literature on refusal that emerges from multiple disciplines, including queer and affect theory, Native studies, Black feminism, and disability studies. Centering the margins, this perspective directly speaks to processes of domination, elucidating the recursive relationship among self, care, and personhood—how practices of care produce persons, and in turn, how only those accorded full personhood are deemed worthy of care. Containing these multiple and conflicting definitions, self-care thus exposes the current experience of crisis as bifurcated: either hopelessly ongoing or hopefully at a breaking point that will lead to change.